Abstract |
In the last years there is the growing trend in electronic devices to aggregate as mush as possible services trying to provide to its user all the possible necessary functions. For example TV tuners that connect to the Internet, mobile phones acting also as MP3-players, wristwatches that can store files etc. With technologies like WLAN and Bluetooth that provide wireless connectivity, and even more with the ability of ad-hoc discovery and networking between electronic appliances, an alternative distributed computational model could be exploited where a device will not necessarily implement all its services but discover and use the services provided from other devices with a simple and flexible manner, formulating small "personal area" networks tailored to the needs of each user. To accomplish this distributed model there is the need of devices to discover ad-hoc the available surrounding services/devices, so there is the need of a discovery mechanism that will provide this functionality with respect to speed of discovery, high degree of discoverability success and low energy consumption. In this work we studied the design and implementation of the Bluetooth platform and its Service Discovery Protocol to see its abilities and its problems in personal area networking. Taking into consideration the current research in the area of service discovery over networks, we proposed some improvements based on a hybrid peer-to-peer architecture called "super-peers", using the underlying mechanism of Bluetooth device discovery. We implemented them over real Bluetooth devices and we proved, using extensive experiments on typical usage scenarios, that they do improve the current Service Discovery Protocol.
|